All posts tagged Architecture

A prank that saw the American flags on New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge replaced with bleached white flags is not the first time the city’s skyscrapers and bridges have played host to a high-flying stunt.

Here are five places in New York City that have played often unwitting host to some high-flying stunts, some inspired by the views and adrenalin rush attainable from scaling great heights, others for the level of attention that can be gained from making a point at a stomach-dropping height. Read More »

Standing at 60 stories in a Gothic style, with gargoyle embellishments that call to mind a European cathedral, it was christened by a reverend as a “Cathedral of Commerce” at its grand opening, according to a city landmark-designation report written by architectural historian Anthony Robins.

In the pre-skyscraper era, the city was dominated by tall church spires, Mr. Robins said in an interview, and some New Yorkers of the time mourned the loss of the skyline’s religious character. One contemporary critic, he noted, even suggested that new skyscrapers be crowned with crosses.

“Before these enormous buildings went up — the Singer, the Metropolitan Life, the Woolworth — the New York skyline was really religious,” Mr. Robins said. ”When the buildings of commerce rose that high, it changed the flavor of the city.” Read More »

José Guízar is fixated on a window into New York life that other people might look right past — actual city windows.

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

José Guízar is pictured in SoHo. The 26-year-old graphic designer has created the website Windows of New York. See more photos.

Mr. Guízar, a 26-year-old graphic designer, has created a website featuring nothing but his colorful illustrations of the shuttered, barred and even air-conditioner-covered windows that have caught his eye around the city.

A New Yorker for only a year, Mr. Guízar said he started drawing the largely unnoticed building feature because he never wants to overlook the city’s architectural quirks. “We get so used to our routine that we walk the same street every day and take the same train and we forget what’s around us,” he said.

One World Trade Center, built to replace the towers destroyed Sept. 11, 2001, on Monday gets steel columns to make it New York City’s tallest building. Once finished, it will be one of the world’s highest.

With its steel beams expected to rise past 1,250 feet on Monday, One World Trade Center will eclipse the Empire State Building as the tallest building in New York City on its way to becoming the Western Hemisphere’s highest skyscraper.

One WTC’s 1,776-foot height, measured from the top of its spire, is a towering achievement by American standards — 325 feet taller than the nation’s current highest, the 1451-foot Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly the Sears Tower).

But when compared to skyscraper projects underway across the globe, the skyscraper formerly known as the Freedom Tower projects a less imposing image: 1,776 feet just isn’t so tall anymore.

With fast-growing economies and a desire to use buildings as statements, countries in the Middle East and East Asia have seized the tallest-skyscraper mantle from the U.S., which for the bulk of the 20th century was home to the world’s tallest building (a distinction that passed between towers in Chicago and New York).

The current holder of the world’s tallest title, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa at 2,717 feet, reaches nearly 1,000 feet higher than the One WTC’s completed height. If the Freedom Tower was completed tomorrow, it would become the second-tallest skyscraper in the world. But even that distinction would be short-lived. Read More »

The lobby area and entrance to the main theater at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.

Two New York City structures made Wall Street Journal architecture critic Julie V. Iovine’s list of her favorite buildings from 2011. Included in her year-in-design review are Frank Gehry’s first U.S. skyscraper at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan, above, and the new addition to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.

Of the museum, the critic explains:

When the addition, designed by Thomas Leeser, an architect’s architect with few completed works, opened in January following at least one complete redesign, the diamond-cut opaque facade with its canted, liquid white walls and Yves-Klein-blue quilted auditorium, among other zoomy touches, propelled the museum in a stroke to the forefront of high-tech media display spaces. Read More »

T.J. Gottesdiener is a managing partner of Skidmore Owings & Merrill in the firm’s New York City office. Going back decades, the firm has been a giant in the New York architectural scene, particularly of office buildings, designing modernist towers including the Lever House, One Chase Manhattan Plaza and 9 West 57th Street.

Today, of the four major office towers currently rising in New York, SOM is the architect for three of them: Boston Properties’ 250 West 55th Street; Extell Development’s International Gem Tower; and, of course, One World Trade Center, the 1,776-foot skyscraper going up in Lower Manhattan.

A sculpture of a World War I-era biplane sits atop 77 Water Street in Lower Manhattan. See more photos.

For years, Shawn Hakimian has wondered why a World War I fighter plane sits on the roof of 77 Water Street.

“It’s not every day you see an airplane taking off from a New York City building,” says Hakimian, a developer whose 75 Wall Street condominiums have views onto the roof of the neighboring Water Street building and the biplane that is parked there, on a landing strip lined with runway lights. “It’s one of our buyers’ most commonly asked questions.”

When the William Kaufman Organization built the 26-story office tower in 1970, the owner wanted to adorn its roof with something more interesting than air-conditioning machinery.

“When you’re in a building that’s higher, and you’re looking down, it’s pretty ugly,” says Robert Kaufman, the company’s president. “So we said: ‘what can we do?’ And we got the idea of putting an airplane on the roof.” Read More »

Voters in Garden City, N.Y., don’t want to tear down St. Paul’s School, an unused 128-year-old building owed by the village.

An upscale Long Island suburb voted against a plan to demolish a 128-year-old architectural gem that has sat unused for decades.

That means St. Paul’s School, a former boarding school, is safe — for now. But while voters in Garden City, N.Y., made clear their overwhelming opposition to tearing down the village-owned building, local officials are still no closer to figuring out how to use it.

A historic boarding school building in a Long Island village may be destroyed — at a cost of nearly $4 million — because village residents cannot agree on how best to use the vacant 128-year-old structure.

The future of the outdated but architecturally significant building has been uncertain for nearly two decades, with residents unable to get behind any proposal for its reuse. But the clock may finally be running out for the four-story school topped with spires and gargoyles: The village council has already approved floating $3.75 million in bonds to pay for demolition.

The boarding school closed decades ago, and the village purchased the structure from the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island in 1993 for $7.25 million. Apartment giant AvalonBay offered to save the structure and transform it into housing.

But that idea didn’t sit well with residents of this upscale area. Read More »

On his travels, Everson spent a night at Yale’s Ingalls Rink, known as the Yale Whale because of the oddly whale-shaped roof on the building. The building in New Haven, Conn., took honors for the best design of the 10 rinks examined. It was created by the same famed architect behind the former TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport, which might be transformed into a boutique hotel.